Dredging delay "crisis" in Nigeria

Nigerian News Service

The completion of capital dredging on the Niger River, originally scheduled for June, was delayed another five months, Nigerian News Service reported July 6. Van Oord spokesmen said the company was only dredging two of five lots, the volume of sand and rock had far exceeded the original estimates of 1.8 million cubic meters of sand and 230,000 tons of rocks, and their work was 90 percent complete. Nigerian officials blamed Van Oord Nigeria for underestimating the amount of sand to be dredged. But some sources said government attention to the dredging project had flagged since the death of President Umaru Yar’adua in May 2010.

This article appears in the July-August 2011 issue of International Dredging Review